A company like Apple with a huge hoard of capital and something like a monopoly on its products soon begins to act and think like a financial services company.
There is too much risk actually innovating within its field, and because of its monopoly-like control over its products, it doesn't actually need to innovate. The risk of innovation is of course failing, and the capital it spent on the innovation project being wasted in comparison to some other use, such as holding T-bills.
Thus management stops thinking about product innovation and starts thinking about capital innovation, and usually this winds up being some kind of financial service business since it tends to have the same low level of risk as other highly liquid financial instrument, except with slightly higher margins.
My last car was technically a luxury car and the 3 things in its life span that failed were the fuel pump, the power steering pump and the alternator all failed by 137,000 miles. The expensive luxury crap actually never failed. Maybe there are dirt cheap and very small econoboxes without power steering still, but all ICE cars have alternators and fuel pumps.
At least in cars, there's a very blurry line between luxury and technology anymore. Luxury seems to be less about gadgets than about certain ride qualities and interior finishes, especially with so many manufacturers selling the same platform under two different marquees. And most gadgets can be had on their non-luxury brands, with only a handful of them held back. You can barely buy a car with manual windows and a manual transmission because most carmakers put that stuff in every car, probably because the parts have become so cheap to manufacture and the economies of scale of using the same window actuator over all your vehicles makes sense.
And the 'debt' on a car loan is pretty trivial at least while interest rates are so low. I bought a new car for 2.99% financing for 60 months. The S&P over 60 months is up something like 50% over the last 60 months. It's terrible economics to dump money into a depreciating asset when the same money can be put into the appreciating assets. My car cost $40k. I put $5k down to get the good financing and could have put the other $35k and paid cash, which would have saved me $4800 in interest. But the same $35k invested over 60 months returns $17.5k in gains. So even with the interest on the loan, I'm still ahead by nearly $13k.
There was probably a window of time where some bare-bones car a mechanically sophisticated person could self-repair and drive for 200k miles made sense, but not really anymore.
What's interesting is how well some immigrants integrate and how well some don't. In the US, I've run into a lot of 2nd generation Latinos that are so suburban middle class you'd think they were immigrants from the 19th century, not the 1970s.
It might have something to do with racial appearance, a lot of Latinos are very Caucasian in terms of racial appearance and can often be confused with Italians, Greeks or Jews. But I think some of it is cultural -- for all the anti-Mexican hysteria, Mexican culture more or less is European.
It's worse than that, the airlines willingly keep buying into each new iteration of a dated design because it keeps their costs down -- less pilot training, less mechanic training, and so on.
Boeing makes those things optional not just because they can but because airlines want to fly the cheapest plane they can. Do you think the airlines don't have pilots, aerospace experts and so on involved in buying their planes? They absolutely go through these planes and their optional features and advise the airlines on how to drive down the price of new planes by keeping unnecessary stuff off them that's not necessary. Especially when its an extension of an existing design.
What's ironic about all this Boeing outrage is that consumers do this stuff themselves EVERY DAY -- they choose cheaper car models/trim lines that don't have the same safety features as the top trim lines. Why? It saves money. It's been like this for years -- ABS, stability control, airbags, front collision detection, lane departure warnings, blind spot warnings, directional headlamps, all of these were optional at one point and some still are on many cars.
Fuck, a former Delta executive just got nominated to run the FAA -- do you think the airlines aren't lobbying the FAA to make less safety shit mandatory so they can keep planes cheap?
Did Boeing make an engineering fuckup? Who knows? I'm not a 737 pilot and honestly I think you have to be one to truly understand this issue. But the public outrage directed at Boeing alone is ridiculous and lets the airlines totally off the hook.
You can tell when you've burned a wick in about a second, it tastes awful. But under normal vaping conditions, the wick doesn't ever reach a temperature where it *can* burn. You have to run your vape dry to get it to burn.
As near as I can tell, the days of cheap, easy-to-burn vapes are mostly over. Most everyone has moved onto very-low/sub-ohm atomizers that are literally in a vape juice bath that keep the wick saturated and won't allow it to burn. The coils are stainless steel, and the wick is cotton.
Just like with all the other drugs, the moralizers are only making the problem worse by trying to ban it or run it underground. Unless they make nicotine a schedule I controlled substance, vaping will continue except people who want to vape will be using home-brew e-liquids where they add their own nicotine and blend in god knows what flavorizers, many of which could potentially be actually unhealthy (and not just "we're uncertain" unhealthy).
It would be SO MUCH more helpful if they would just stick to regulating it so that all vape juices sold had to meet strict lab quality tests and use ingredients generally recognized as safe. But making vaping safer isn't what they're after, they don't want anyone consuming any nicotine at all, and it's not a health concern, it's morality.
What fucking puzzles me is why nobody -- anti-junk-call advocates or anyone else -- has trotted out someone knows a fucking thing or two about telephony.
If I was Jane Senator grandstanding on this, I'd drag out someone who knew something about telecoms to let the public know that the carriers already can and do this kind of filtering, and then let the shit hit the carriers in the fan about why they're perpetuating this.
I think this is mostly right. From the 1970s on, the anti-smoking industry only grew in political influence and overall resources. I bet in the beginning they saw this as a never-ending battle. When they largely "won" with the tobacco settlements, it was like suddenly gaining access to a perpetual annuity -- limitless funding combined with political and moral authority.
The problem is, changes in smoking laws actually reduced smoking. A lot. Around here, smoking was limited early on (mid-70s) and in the late 90s/early 2000s got even more restrictive to the point where you couldn't really smoke in any public place (no bars, restaurants, etc), and many hotels, apartments, etc., followed suit. The people who didn't quit outright (still smoked in their homes or cars) certainly cut their consumption and a lot of people just kind of gave it up when there was nowhere but outside (and even that was restricted).
At this point, I think a lot of people were starting to question the resources and authority given to non-smoking and it presented an existential risk to organizations whose reason for being was going up in smoke. The introduction of vaping was a gift from heaven to the anti-smoking industry. A new lease on life. An activity that was so similar to smoking that they could easily conflate it in the minds of the public and trade on unknown risks as equivalent to known risks. Most people think they're the same thing, and there are educated adults who can't be convinced that vaping isn't smoking even when presented with the basic facts.
What's so ironic about this is the success of marijuana legalizaiton at the same time. While its possible to consume it without smoking, it's very much a smoking-centered activity and the arguments for not banning vaping are *at least* as compelling as the arguments for legalizing marijuana (if you're for legalizing marijuana because prohibition doesn't work).
It's come down to what the basic reality of what anti-smoking is -- a form of *moral advocacy*. It's about smoking being unhealthy but it's also about opposing a pleasure-inducing activity that has no moral justification. Anti-smoking forces going after vaping are either just gaming to keep their revenue and influence going, or they're pursuing a morality goal that's only shrouded in health concerns.
A database of which carriers can terminate which numbers is already in existence and used every day -- otherwise we wouldn't have phone number portability. It should be easy to determine if calling party identification is legitimate and that the source of a call is legitimate just based on whether you know if it is the termination path for a reversed call.
There are some legitimate reasons for misidentifying a call (call origin does not match call termination path), but these could be handled administratively or via shifting the technical burden to the originator. If you're a call center, you may have to actually route your calls through your customer's network and they may have to deal with the complexity of this, but with VoIP and the Internet, they should be able to do this pretty easily.
I would say the reasons carriers don't implement it is:
1) Cost/complexity -- it's not like reverse path verification is a feature that's enabled and they're just not using, it'd probably involve costs to implement and complicate long-term maintenance and operation.
2) I'd wager the telephony industry more widely exploits the lack of reverse path verification, and more than just for remote call center stuff. I'd guess this gets (ab)used for various kinds of telecom redundancy, cost/carrier shifting (you really care about incoming call quality/reliability, but outbound needs to only be extremely cheap). It's something akin to doing split path IP routing, where you want to put most of your traffic on a cheap, high-bandwidth circuit with no static IPs but you want to associate it with IPs from your expensive, high-value circuit. You can do this with BGP routing, but it's hard and expensive. With phone calls, split paths are simple and easy.
3) Carrier complicity -- they make money off calls, so they have an incentive to maximize calls. Just like credit card companies make money off even fraudulent transactions. Any security which limits transactions is seen as a profit threat, even if/when it lowers fraud rates. The incentive is to maximize transactions and shift fraud costs elsewhere, like to credit issuers and merchants.
There are populations like the Inuit who traditionally ate diets extremely high in fat, because way up near the Arctic Circle that's all there is to eat.
Most native diets these days are driven by economics, and thanks to agriculture, that makes beans and whole grains cheap and most vegetables can be home grown. Meat is expensive. It's a poverty diet.
I'd wager a lot of these devices wind up implemented because someone in marketing just had to have a giant TV blasting their propaganda, and bought a gadget they saw advertised or inked some deal with a company who provided the gear "for free".
The latter is especially pernicious, I've helped implement one for a client that they just love because they can connect to the providers web site and upload their messages, and the device lays it out with a news/weather ticker (and advertising if it was "free").
It's pernicious because now you have a computer on your network that requires internet connectivity and accepts code and data from the outside over which you have zero control.
You can implement them safely, but it requires a lot of effort -- a private DMZ-type VLAN dedicated to these displays that can get to the internet but not to the rest of the network. A solution complicated by the fact that where they want to mount them has no wired LAN port but does wireless but can't work with the captive portal for guest access. And that's if the device isn't some dumb hybrid, requiring both local web access for some configuration *and* continuous connectivity to the internet for centrally pushed content.
Ergo, the security questions and complexity/effort of secure implementation get pushed aside so Karen in marketing can have her propaganda outlet.
I've bought clothes for years from LL Bean because of above average quality at reasonable prices, and most importantly the ability to always find specific size combinations that are almost impossible to find at retail, unless you want to buy weird items on sale or pay full price.
I've always said in my next life I want to come back as about 5'4 so I can get great stuff on sale. The sales racks are always full of men's small (and medium, to some degree) and I've never been able to figure out why this trend persists.
You would think clothing makers would sort out sales data and make fewer in extreme sizes that don't sell well. There must be some other explanation, like high demand for those sizes at full retail prices, although you would think people who wear those sizes would also figure out they're always available on clearance. Or maybe the marginally less material they use somehow averages out full price + clearance price to remain as profitable as more in-demand sizing.
Do they care about your balance when the maximum withdrawal amount is only a few hundred dollars?
Banks really like to charge overdraft (and other) fees, plus there's some failsafe aspect to consider if there are communications problems.
I always figured that while the banks would like to verify funds, NSF fees make it on the whole profitable to just kick out cash in the event they can't verify funds. The transaction limit lowers their risk.
We know what carrier every number belongs to thanks to number portability. That database exists and is updated frequently, or you couldn't port your number to a new carrier. This database enables carriers to connect outgoing call to the carrier who can complete the call.
All that needs to happen is for ATT, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile to verify that an inbound call seeking to be completed on their network comes from the carrier that number belongs to. If it doesn't, then it should be rejected. If those four carriers alone started doing this, I'm pretty sure robocalls would collapse because so many of them wouldn't get through.
One step better would be for all carriers to reject any inbound call using ANI that doesn't belong to that subscriber. Since individual carriers know what number blocks they are associated with and which blocks belong to their subscribers (all necessary for proper call termination), that database essentially exists, too.
All this mumbo-jumbo of "what about VoIP" misses the point; the calls have to enter the public phone network someplace, and ultimately in the jungle of low-rent VoIP carriers are circuits that enable them to terminate calls on the major carriers, those circuits cost money and the carrier is keeping track of inbound calls.
The fact that carriers haven't done anything like this really means they're part of the problem, making revenue off of it and are loathe to threaten that revenue.
I think capital hoarding is an interesting phenomenon and I'd wager has a lot to do with low growth and income inequality. There were a lot of stories not that long ago about corporations having so much cash and cash-equivalent securities on hand they were having trouble managing it, to the point that banks were charging negative interest rates for large amounts.
One argument was that the money was tied up due to taxes, like Apple being unwilling to repatriate money due to not wanting to pay taxes on it. It raises the question, though, that if they can park billions, they have no apparent use for it, either, besides a hedge against some future uncertainty. And some of it I think is driven by a lack of innovation or willingness to be exposed to risk or some kind of semi-monopoly status that reduces innovation and investment pressure.
At the individual level, I'd wager that tax shelter strategies probably make it worse -- moving money offshore into tax havens probably reduces its ability to do useful work in the economy. Taxes are ubiquitous, and the better you shelter your money from taxes the more likely its also isn't part of the economy, either, because it would eventually be exposed to taxation schemes.
It might be that there's a larger cycle that's harder to control surrounding taxes, government spending and capital hoarding. When taxes become too high, you get a long-term stage of tax resistance, with attacks on government spending and a move to shelter capital from taxation and capital hoarding. If the government can support itself through borrowing, it slows the response to capital sheltering, since its argued that the government doesn't "need" the capital or spends too much on unnecessary programs, especially when capital gains outsized influence over the government.
We're probably about to enter the end of the capital hoarding cycle, as the negatives are outweighing the positives and the resulting social tension and increasing political extremism and instability will likely result in higher taxes being imposed.
It's too bad that economists try so hard to be apolitical mathematicians. There's probably a way to model more ideal taxation levels and the public spending which maximizes public well being.
I thought this had been studied, and hunter-gatherers were assumed to be "working" about 4-6 hours per day. I suppose it really depends on where they live, marginal geographies may require more effort, especially if the primary game source is prone to large migration distances.
But in a lot of geographies, there were pretty large areas with a ton of game because of small human populations putting little pressure on populations. The game basically maximized their populations to what the environment would support.
I think doctors have a cognitive bias (or biases) that likes to blame patients for their illnesses, especially if they can tie them to some self-help step like not enough exercise or some other perhaps true but unlikely "lack of effort" lifestyle choice.
I had a doctor who said my headaches would be helped by more exercise. Admittedly, I didn't do any structured kind of exercise besides daily mile-long walks with the dog. I bought an elliptical machine and began using it every day. Next doctor visit, "well, you're probably not getting enough exercise". I described my use of the elliptical and he looked at me like I was liar.
Finally I asked him, "OK, how much exercise and what type do I need? Be specific in terms of heart rate, duration, frequency" and then he rambled about hiring a personal trainer. Basically it was a bullshit suggestion like "reboot your computer" that had nothing to do with my illness that he assumed I wouldn't comply with, probably with the hope that I'd avoid him knowing I was guilty of non-compliance.
I think part of it is that doctors go through a ton of training and effort to become doctors and end up assuming if they can go through with complex, high-discipline programs to achieve their goals than anyone can, without recognizing that some people are less able for reasons which have nothing to do with moral judgements about laziness/character/morals. It's no different than rich people who blame poor people for not working hard enough.
Around here, the entire city is "officially" broken up into named neighborhoods as part of some long-term city-driven program to distribute some small portion of city funds. It got started when some affluent neighborhoods began banding together in the early 70s to get more attention from the city. So they officially named/divided the city up into neighborhoods so they would have more equal opportunities to get funds/attention from the city.
The names they ended up using were a mishmash of school names/parks and some of the more colloquial names that had been in use and actually remain in use.
The kind of funny thing is that there's a subset of neighborhood names that are well known and frequently used but are generally applied in ways that have nothing to do with official neighborhood geography. "Uptown" is a narrow official neighborhood, but gets used for an area that encompasses 2-3 additional official neighborhoods.
Some of the names are older names that predate the official neighborhood designations, some are official neighborhood designations that gained traction because the areas didn't have well-known names,. In one case, an official neighborhood name was an informal name that replaced a more formal neighborhood designation.
I think there will always be a disconnect between informal, well-known geographic names and official names. I doubt many cities were founded with a list of official neighborhood names, with the exception of some newer suburbs where planners imposed them or where formal associations exist that more strictly define them. In older cities, neighborhood names reflect the name of a village before it got incorporated or some kind of origin label -- "Joe's Corner" probably used to be owned by Joe.
Then you have ethnic designations that refer to areas that often are no longer associated with a specific ethnic group -- Little Italy, Chinatown, etc, but have also always been subsets of larger geographic areas with names.
I'm not sure neighborhood names mean anything at all, really, except to realtors and locals who need a convenient label when talking about some subset of the city informally.
I see it as interesting byproduct of excess renewable generation capacity -- when you can make the power, but have no other useful work to do with it. At that point it's free energy.
I also think it's kind of forward thinking, as I expect that as green energy sources proliferate there will be more surplus generation periods available. Plus some wind or solar farms may wind up become essentially surplus but before their useful generation life is passed. Putting them to work generating hydrogen seems like a better idea than idling them to rot or just dismantling them.
I'd mostly expect that hydrogen generated this way would be blended into natural gas supplies or consumed on site for some kind of co-generation, not the source of a large-scale hydrogen economy.
You can buy very well equipped mid-sized SUVs from Honda, Subaru, Hyundai, and so on that have near-vertical rear doors and 2.5 cubic meters of cargo space for under $40k.
From a sales perspective, I think Telsa is fooling themselves they can seriously call this the kind of SUV they claim it to be, especially at that price point.
Divestment from South Africa got you someplace in the late 1980s, especially if your school had any black students. Nuclear weapons was an option if you were in a unicorn district that was rich and liberal.
Vietnam was a morally righteous cause in the late 60s and early 70s, but you probably got punished for it anyway.
I'd wager changes to Instagram might be justifiable if enough moms are also bothered by them.
My wife's Acura has a "oil life remaining" info display, but I always assumed this was a kind of hybrid idiot light that combined time and mileage and perhaps oil level into a number. I'd wager an instant oil analysis sensor based directly on the oil quality itself would be a neat trick, but it seems unlikely that any oil life measurement would be made from the oil itself and instead derived from things like mileage, time and maybe some other mechanical sensor readings which were correlated to oil life during testing.
My brand-new Subaru (with a brand new engine design) doesn't have an oil life number that I can see and the manual is completely mileage based for oil.
I don't know that 6k miles is really that exotic for oil range given the advances in oil itself (especially full synthetics) and greatly improved machining tolerances and designs. It still nags at me, though, considering the tiny oil passages and the risk for sludge accumulation over the long haul.
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A revolver has a feed mechanism that rotates or "revolves" as it fires.
Does this make the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger a "revolver" because it too rotates as it fires?
My guess is the early business models suggested cable subscriptions could actually support some or all channels through just generic subscriber fees.
But I think this lasted like 5 minutes, my first exposure to cable was in about 1982 and the stations all had commercials except for HBO.
A company like Apple with a huge hoard of capital and something like a monopoly on its products soon begins to act and think like a financial services company.
There is too much risk actually innovating within its field, and because of its monopoly-like control over its products, it doesn't actually need to innovate. The risk of innovation is of course failing, and the capital it spent on the innovation project being wasted in comparison to some other use, such as holding T-bills.
Thus management stops thinking about product innovation and starts thinking about capital innovation, and usually this winds up being some kind of financial service business since it tends to have the same low level of risk as other highly liquid financial instrument, except with slightly higher margins.
My last car was technically a luxury car and the 3 things in its life span that failed were the fuel pump, the power steering pump and the alternator all failed by 137,000 miles. The expensive luxury crap actually never failed. Maybe there are dirt cheap and very small econoboxes without power steering still, but all ICE cars have alternators and fuel pumps.
At least in cars, there's a very blurry line between luxury and technology anymore. Luxury seems to be less about gadgets than about certain ride qualities and interior finishes, especially with so many manufacturers selling the same platform under two different marquees. And most gadgets can be had on their non-luxury brands, with only a handful of them held back. You can barely buy a car with manual windows and a manual transmission because most carmakers put that stuff in every car, probably because the parts have become so cheap to manufacture and the economies of scale of using the same window actuator over all your vehicles makes sense.
And the 'debt' on a car loan is pretty trivial at least while interest rates are so low. I bought a new car for 2.99% financing for 60 months. The S&P over 60 months is up something like 50% over the last 60 months. It's terrible economics to dump money into a depreciating asset when the same money can be put into the appreciating assets. My car cost $40k. I put $5k down to get the good financing and could have put the other $35k and paid cash, which would have saved me $4800 in interest. But the same $35k invested over 60 months returns $17.5k in gains. So even with the interest on the loan, I'm still ahead by nearly $13k.
There was probably a window of time where some bare-bones car a mechanically sophisticated person could self-repair and drive for 200k miles made sense, but not really anymore.
What's interesting is how well some immigrants integrate and how well some don't. In the US, I've run into a lot of 2nd generation Latinos that are so suburban middle class you'd think they were immigrants from the 19th century, not the 1970s.
It might have something to do with racial appearance, a lot of Latinos are very Caucasian in terms of racial appearance and can often be confused with Italians, Greeks or Jews. But I think some of it is cultural -- for all the anti-Mexican hysteria, Mexican culture more or less is European.
Seatbelts aren't optional now, but they were at one time! Volvo got their start as a safety-oriented brand by making shoulder belts standard.
It's worse than that, the airlines willingly keep buying into each new iteration of a dated design because it keeps their costs down -- less pilot training, less mechanic training, and so on.
Boeing makes those things optional not just because they can but because airlines want to fly the cheapest plane they can. Do you think the airlines don't have pilots, aerospace experts and so on involved in buying their planes? They absolutely go through these planes and their optional features and advise the airlines on how to drive down the price of new planes by keeping unnecessary stuff off them that's not necessary. Especially when its an extension of an existing design.
What's ironic about all this Boeing outrage is that consumers do this stuff themselves EVERY DAY -- they choose cheaper car models/trim lines that don't have the same safety features as the top trim lines. Why? It saves money. It's been like this for years -- ABS, stability control, airbags, front collision detection, lane departure warnings, blind spot warnings, directional headlamps, all of these were optional at one point and some still are on many cars.
Fuck, a former Delta executive just got nominated to run the FAA -- do you think the airlines aren't lobbying the FAA to make less safety shit mandatory so they can keep planes cheap?
Did Boeing make an engineering fuckup? Who knows? I'm not a 737 pilot and honestly I think you have to be one to truly understand this issue. But the public outrage directed at Boeing alone is ridiculous and lets the airlines totally off the hook.
You can tell when you've burned a wick in about a second, it tastes awful. But under normal vaping conditions, the wick doesn't ever reach a temperature where it *can* burn. You have to run your vape dry to get it to burn.
As near as I can tell, the days of cheap, easy-to-burn vapes are mostly over. Most everyone has moved onto very-low/sub-ohm atomizers that are literally in a vape juice bath that keep the wick saturated and won't allow it to burn. The coils are stainless steel, and the wick is cotton.
Just like with all the other drugs, the moralizers are only making the problem worse by trying to ban it or run it underground. Unless they make nicotine a schedule I controlled substance, vaping will continue except people who want to vape will be using home-brew e-liquids where they add their own nicotine and blend in god knows what flavorizers, many of which could potentially be actually unhealthy (and not just "we're uncertain" unhealthy).
It would be SO MUCH more helpful if they would just stick to regulating it so that all vape juices sold had to meet strict lab quality tests and use ingredients generally recognized as safe. But making vaping safer isn't what they're after, they don't want anyone consuming any nicotine at all, and it's not a health concern, it's morality.
What fucking puzzles me is why nobody -- anti-junk-call advocates or anyone else -- has trotted out someone knows a fucking thing or two about telephony.
If I was Jane Senator grandstanding on this, I'd drag out someone who knew something about telecoms to let the public know that the carriers already can and do this kind of filtering, and then let the shit hit the carriers in the fan about why they're perpetuating this.
I think this is mostly right. From the 1970s on, the anti-smoking industry only grew in political influence and overall resources. I bet in the beginning they saw this as a never-ending battle. When they largely "won" with the tobacco settlements, it was like suddenly gaining access to a perpetual annuity -- limitless funding combined with political and moral authority.
The problem is, changes in smoking laws actually reduced smoking. A lot. Around here, smoking was limited early on (mid-70s) and in the late 90s/early 2000s got even more restrictive to the point where you couldn't really smoke in any public place (no bars, restaurants, etc), and many hotels, apartments, etc., followed suit. The people who didn't quit outright (still smoked in their homes or cars) certainly cut their consumption and a lot of people just kind of gave it up when there was nowhere but outside (and even that was restricted).
At this point, I think a lot of people were starting to question the resources and authority given to non-smoking and it presented an existential risk to organizations whose reason for being was going up in smoke. The introduction of vaping was a gift from heaven to the anti-smoking industry. A new lease on life. An activity that was so similar to smoking that they could easily conflate it in the minds of the public and trade on unknown risks as equivalent to known risks. Most people think they're the same thing, and there are educated adults who can't be convinced that vaping isn't smoking even when presented with the basic facts.
What's so ironic about this is the success of marijuana legalizaiton at the same time. While its possible to consume it without smoking, it's very much a smoking-centered activity and the arguments for not banning vaping are *at least* as compelling as the arguments for legalizing marijuana (if you're for legalizing marijuana because prohibition doesn't work).
It's come down to what the basic reality of what anti-smoking is -- a form of *moral advocacy*. It's about smoking being unhealthy but it's also about opposing a pleasure-inducing activity that has no moral justification. Anti-smoking forces going after vaping are either just gaming to keep their revenue and influence going, or they're pursuing a morality goal that's only shrouded in health concerns.
Parent poster is absolutely correct.
A database of which carriers can terminate which numbers is already in existence and used every day -- otherwise we wouldn't have phone number portability. It should be easy to determine if calling party identification is legitimate and that the source of a call is legitimate just based on whether you know if it is the termination path for a reversed call.
There are some legitimate reasons for misidentifying a call (call origin does not match call termination path), but these could be handled administratively or via shifting the technical burden to the originator. If you're a call center, you may have to actually route your calls through your customer's network and they may have to deal with the complexity of this, but with VoIP and the Internet, they should be able to do this pretty easily.
I would say the reasons carriers don't implement it is:
1) Cost/complexity -- it's not like reverse path verification is a feature that's enabled and they're just not using, it'd probably involve costs to implement and complicate long-term maintenance and operation.
2) I'd wager the telephony industry more widely exploits the lack of reverse path verification, and more than just for remote call center stuff. I'd guess this gets (ab)used for various kinds of telecom redundancy, cost/carrier shifting (you really care about incoming call quality/reliability, but outbound needs to only be extremely cheap). It's something akin to doing split path IP routing, where you want to put most of your traffic on a cheap, high-bandwidth circuit with no static IPs but you want to associate it with IPs from your expensive, high-value circuit. You can do this with BGP routing, but it's hard and expensive. With phone calls, split paths are simple and easy.
3) Carrier complicity -- they make money off calls, so they have an incentive to maximize calls. Just like credit card companies make money off even fraudulent transactions. Any security which limits transactions is seen as a profit threat, even if/when it lowers fraud rates. The incentive is to maximize transactions and shift fraud costs elsewhere, like to credit issuers and merchants.
There are populations like the Inuit who traditionally ate diets extremely high in fat, because way up near the Arctic Circle that's all there is to eat.
Most native diets these days are driven by economics, and thanks to agriculture, that makes beans and whole grains cheap and most vegetables can be home grown. Meat is expensive. It's a poverty diet.
I'd wager a lot of these devices wind up implemented because someone in marketing just had to have a giant TV blasting their propaganda, and bought a gadget they saw advertised or inked some deal with a company who provided the gear "for free".
The latter is especially pernicious, I've helped implement one for a client that they just love because they can connect to the providers web site and upload their messages, and the device lays it out with a news/weather ticker (and advertising if it was "free").
It's pernicious because now you have a computer on your network that requires internet connectivity and accepts code and data from the outside over which you have zero control.
You can implement them safely, but it requires a lot of effort -- a private DMZ-type VLAN dedicated to these displays that can get to the internet but not to the rest of the network. A solution complicated by the fact that where they want to mount them has no wired LAN port but does wireless but can't work with the captive portal for guest access. And that's if the device isn't some dumb hybrid, requiring both local web access for some configuration *and* continuous connectivity to the internet for centrally pushed content.
Ergo, the security questions and complexity/effort of secure implementation get pushed aside so Karen in marketing can have her propaganda outlet.
I've bought clothes for years from LL Bean because of above average quality at reasonable prices, and most importantly the ability to always find specific size combinations that are almost impossible to find at retail, unless you want to buy weird items on sale or pay full price.
I've always said in my next life I want to come back as about 5'4 so I can get great stuff on sale. The sales racks are always full of men's small (and medium, to some degree) and I've never been able to figure out why this trend persists.
You would think clothing makers would sort out sales data and make fewer in extreme sizes that don't sell well. There must be some other explanation, like high demand for those sizes at full retail prices, although you would think people who wear those sizes would also figure out they're always available on clearance. Or maybe the marginally less material they use somehow averages out full price + clearance price to remain as profitable as more in-demand sizing.
Do they care about your balance when the maximum withdrawal amount is only a few hundred dollars?
Banks really like to charge overdraft (and other) fees, plus there's some failsafe aspect to consider if there are communications problems.
I always figured that while the banks would like to verify funds, NSF fees make it on the whole profitable to just kick out cash in the event they can't verify funds. The transaction limit lowers their risk.
We know what carrier every number belongs to thanks to number portability. That database exists and is updated frequently, or you couldn't port your number to a new carrier. This database enables carriers to connect outgoing call to the carrier who can complete the call.
All that needs to happen is for ATT, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile to verify that an inbound call seeking to be completed on their network comes from the carrier that number belongs to. If it doesn't, then it should be rejected. If those four carriers alone started doing this, I'm pretty sure robocalls would collapse because so many of them wouldn't get through.
One step better would be for all carriers to reject any inbound call using ANI that doesn't belong to that subscriber. Since individual carriers know what number blocks they are associated with and which blocks belong to their subscribers (all necessary for proper call termination), that database essentially exists, too.
All this mumbo-jumbo of "what about VoIP" misses the point; the calls have to enter the public phone network someplace, and ultimately in the jungle of low-rent VoIP carriers are circuits that enable them to terminate calls on the major carriers, those circuits cost money and the carrier is keeping track of inbound calls.
The fact that carriers haven't done anything like this really means they're part of the problem, making revenue off of it and are loathe to threaten that revenue.
I think capital hoarding is an interesting phenomenon and I'd wager has a lot to do with low growth and income inequality. There were a lot of stories not that long ago about corporations having so much cash and cash-equivalent securities on hand they were having trouble managing it, to the point that banks were charging negative interest rates for large amounts.
One argument was that the money was tied up due to taxes, like Apple being unwilling to repatriate money due to not wanting to pay taxes on it. It raises the question, though, that if they can park billions, they have no apparent use for it, either, besides a hedge against some future uncertainty. And some of it I think is driven by a lack of innovation or willingness to be exposed to risk or some kind of semi-monopoly status that reduces innovation and investment pressure.
At the individual level, I'd wager that tax shelter strategies probably make it worse -- moving money offshore into tax havens probably reduces its ability to do useful work in the economy. Taxes are ubiquitous, and the better you shelter your money from taxes the more likely its also isn't part of the economy, either, because it would eventually be exposed to taxation schemes.
It might be that there's a larger cycle that's harder to control surrounding taxes, government spending and capital hoarding. When taxes become too high, you get a long-term stage of tax resistance, with attacks on government spending and a move to shelter capital from taxation and capital hoarding. If the government can support itself through borrowing, it slows the response to capital sheltering, since its argued that the government doesn't "need" the capital or spends too much on unnecessary programs, especially when capital gains outsized influence over the government.
We're probably about to enter the end of the capital hoarding cycle, as the negatives are outweighing the positives and the resulting social tension and increasing political extremism and instability will likely result in higher taxes being imposed.
It's too bad that economists try so hard to be apolitical mathematicians. There's probably a way to model more ideal taxation levels and the public spending which maximizes public well being.
I thought this had been studied, and hunter-gatherers were assumed to be "working" about 4-6 hours per day. I suppose it really depends on where they live, marginal geographies may require more effort, especially if the primary game source is prone to large migration distances.
But in a lot of geographies, there were pretty large areas with a ton of game because of small human populations putting little pressure on populations. The game basically maximized their populations to what the environment would support.
I think doctors have a cognitive bias (or biases) that likes to blame patients for their illnesses, especially if they can tie them to some self-help step like not enough exercise or some other perhaps true but unlikely "lack of effort" lifestyle choice.
I had a doctor who said my headaches would be helped by more exercise. Admittedly, I didn't do any structured kind of exercise besides daily mile-long walks with the dog. I bought an elliptical machine and began using it every day. Next doctor visit, "well, you're probably not getting enough exercise". I described my use of the elliptical and he looked at me like I was liar.
Finally I asked him, "OK, how much exercise and what type do I need? Be specific in terms of heart rate, duration, frequency" and then he rambled about hiring a personal trainer. Basically it was a bullshit suggestion like "reboot your computer" that had nothing to do with my illness that he assumed I wouldn't comply with, probably with the hope that I'd avoid him knowing I was guilty of non-compliance.
I think part of it is that doctors go through a ton of training and effort to become doctors and end up assuming if they can go through with complex, high-discipline programs to achieve their goals than anyone can, without recognizing that some people are less able for reasons which have nothing to do with moral judgements about laziness/character/morals. It's no different than rich people who blame poor people for not working hard enough.
Around here, the entire city is "officially" broken up into named neighborhoods as part of some long-term city-driven program to distribute some small portion of city funds. It got started when some affluent neighborhoods began banding together in the early 70s to get more attention from the city. So they officially named/divided the city up into neighborhoods so they would have more equal opportunities to get funds/attention from the city.
The names they ended up using were a mishmash of school names/parks and some of the more colloquial names that had been in use and actually remain in use.
The kind of funny thing is that there's a subset of neighborhood names that are well known and frequently used but are generally applied in ways that have nothing to do with official neighborhood geography. "Uptown" is a narrow official neighborhood, but gets used for an area that encompasses 2-3 additional official neighborhoods.
Some of the names are older names that predate the official neighborhood designations, some are official neighborhood designations that gained traction because the areas didn't have well-known names,. In one case, an official neighborhood name was an informal name that replaced a more formal neighborhood designation.
I think there will always be a disconnect between informal, well-known geographic names and official names. I doubt many cities were founded with a list of official neighborhood names, with the exception of some newer suburbs where planners imposed them or where formal associations exist that more strictly define them. In older cities, neighborhood names reflect the name of a village before it got incorporated or some kind of origin label -- "Joe's Corner" probably used to be owned by Joe.
Then you have ethnic designations that refer to areas that often are no longer associated with a specific ethnic group -- Little Italy, Chinatown, etc, but have also always been subsets of larger geographic areas with names.
I'm not sure neighborhood names mean anything at all, really, except to realtors and locals who need a convenient label when talking about some subset of the city informally.
I see it as interesting byproduct of excess renewable generation capacity -- when you can make the power, but have no other useful work to do with it. At that point it's free energy.
I also think it's kind of forward thinking, as I expect that as green energy sources proliferate there will be more surplus generation periods available. Plus some wind or solar farms may wind up become essentially surplus but before their useful generation life is passed. Putting them to work generating hydrogen seems like a better idea than idling them to rot or just dismantling them.
I'd mostly expect that hydrogen generated this way would be blended into natural gas supplies or consumed on site for some kind of co-generation, not the source of a large-scale hydrogen economy.
The Hyundai Kona is $19,000.
You can buy very well equipped mid-sized SUVs from Honda, Subaru, Hyundai, and so on that have near-vertical rear doors and 2.5 cubic meters of cargo space for under $40k.
From a sales perspective, I think Telsa is fooling themselves they can seriously call this the kind of SUV they claim it to be, especially at that price point.
Just call it a luxury compact crossover already.
I'm not sure it's a 4 passenger car, let alone capable of 7.
Divestment from South Africa got you someplace in the late 1980s, especially if your school had any black students. Nuclear weapons was an option if you were in a unicorn district that was rich and liberal.
Vietnam was a morally righteous cause in the late 60s and early 70s, but you probably got punished for it anyway.
I'd wager changes to Instagram might be justifiable if enough moms are also bothered by them.
My wife's Acura has a "oil life remaining" info display, but I always assumed this was a kind of hybrid idiot light that combined time and mileage and perhaps oil level into a number. I'd wager an instant oil analysis sensor based directly on the oil quality itself would be a neat trick, but it seems unlikely that any oil life measurement would be made from the oil itself and instead derived from things like mileage, time and maybe some other mechanical sensor readings which were correlated to oil life during testing.
My brand-new Subaru (with a brand new engine design) doesn't have an oil life number that I can see and the manual is completely mileage based for oil.
I don't know that 6k miles is really that exotic for oil range given the advances in oil itself (especially full synthetics) and greatly improved machining tolerances and designs. It still nags at me, though, considering the tiny oil passages and the risk for sludge accumulation over the long haul.